Gossip vs. Knowledge Theme Analysis

Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deep down, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, “I love you.”

Everyone needs a pile of newspapers: to peel potatoes on, serve bathroom needs, wrap garbage. But not like Alice Manfred. She must have read them over and over else why would she keep them? And if she read anything in the newspaper twice she knew too little about too much. If you have secrets you want kept or want to figure out those other people have, a newspaper can turn your mind. The best thing to find out what’s going on is to watch how people maneuver themselves in the streets […]

But Alice Manfred wasn’t the kind to give herself reasons to be in the streets. […] If she had come out more often, sat on the stoop or gossiped in front of the beauty shop, she would have known more than what the paper said she might have known what was happening under her nose.

The important thing, the biggest thing Violet got out of that was to never never have children. Whatever happened, no small dark foot would rest on another while a hungry mouth said, Mama?

Blues man. Blackandblues man. Blackthereforeblue man.

Everybody knows your name. Where-did-she-go-and-why man. So-lonesome-I-could-die-man.

Everybody knows your name.

I tracked my mother in Virginia and it led me right to her, and I tracked Dorcas from borough to borough. I didn't even have to work at it. Didn't even have to think. Something else takes over when the track begins to talk to you, give out its signs so strong you hardly have to look […] If the trail speaks, no matter what’s in the way, you can find yourself in a crowded room aiming a bullet at her heart, never mind it’s the heart you can't live without […]

I wasn't looking for the trail. It was looking for me and when it started talking at first I couldn’t hear it. I was rambling, just rambling all through the city. I had the gun but it was not the gun—it was my hand I wanted to touch you with.

What was I thinking of? How could I have imagined him so poorly? Not notice the hurt that was not linked to the color of his skin, or the blood that beat beneath it. But to some other thing that longed for authenticity, for a right to be in this place, effortlessly without needing to acquire a false face, a laughless grin, a talking posture. I have been careless and stupid and it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am.

I want to sleep, but it is clear now. So clear the dark bowl the pile of oranges. Just oranges. Bright. Listen. I don’t know who is that woman singing but I know the words by heart.

The way she said it. Not like the ‘me’ was some tough somebody, or somebody she had put together for show. But like, like somebody she favored and could count on. A secret somebody you didn’t have to feel sorry for or have to fight for. Somebody who wouldn’t have to steal a ring to get back at white people and then lie and say it was a present from them. I wanted the ring back not just because my mother asks me have I found it yet. It’s beautiful. But although it belongs to me, it’s not mine. I love it, but there’s a trick in it and I have to agree to the trick to say it’s mine. Reminds me of the tricky blonde kid living inside Mrs. Trace’s head. A present taken from white folks, given to me when I was too young to say No thank you.

Somebody in the house across the alley put a record on and the music floated into us through the open window. Mr. Trace moved his head to the rhythm and his wife snapped her fingers in time. She did a little step in front of him and he smiled. By and by they were dancing. Funny, like old people do, and I laughed for real. Not because of how funny they looked. Something in it made me feel I shouldn’t be there. Shouldn't be looking at them doing that.

[…] When they finished and I asked for my sweater, Mrs. Trace said, ‘Come back anytime. I want to do your hair for you anyway. Free. Your ends need clipping.’

Mr. Trace sat down and stretched. ‘This place needs birds.’

So I missed it altogether. I was sure one would kill the other. I waited for it so I could describe it. I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle. I was so sure, and they danced and walked all over me. Busy, they were, busy being original, complicated, changeable—human, I guess you’d say, while I was the predictable one, confused in my solitude into arrogance, thinking my space, my view, was the only one that was or that mattered. I got so aroused while meddling, well finger-shaping, I overreached and missed the obvious.